


Your whispers echoed underground, Blind dragonflies, unmoored

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Your daughters shall be soldiers, Your sons their patron saints [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Character Death, Deaf Clint Barton, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Fugitives, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Canon Compliant, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 02:37:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20202355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: Sam meets Hawkeye for the first time on a very, very difficult day.It’s not a great first impression, but it’s far from a bad one, either. He’s competent and persistent and just enough of an asshole for Sam to believe he’s genuine.





	Your whispers echoed underground, Blind dragonflies, unmoored

**Author's Note:**

> Friends,
> 
> I am supremely grateful to anyone who is sticking with me on this increasingly rambling journey.
> 
> A couple of important things. There's one moment in this that is a glaring spoiler for my blatant future plans to cover my slightly revised version of the events of Endgame, and if you spot it and are confused, fear not! Explanations will come...eventually.
> 
> I'm also consciously steering clear of following the exact canon of Agents of SHIELD, because I haven't seen nearly enough of it to stay true to it. Please forgive this deviation!
> 
> I feel pressed to acknowledge, too, that this is a rather..._different_ perspective on several characters, most notably Clint and Steve and Sam. I haven't read many MCU fics, but the ones that include Sam always show him as this ultra-confident, ultra-competent dazzling piece of sunshine. Which, fair, he absolutely is. But I think that comes at a price, and that's more what I wanted to explore here.
> 
> Finally, just thank you again, for all your kudos and comments. They mean so much and are a huge help to keep me on track.
> 
> Faithfully,  
LRCx

*

Here’s where they end up.

Sam takes an extra dose of pain medication, adjusts his splinted arm in its sling, and takes up sentry outside Wanda’s hospital room.

He watches Barnes stalk out of the hospital, wounded apex predator, snarling at softness, anger disguising fear. After days of relative inactivity, the hospital is rippling with anticipatory energy. They await two new patients.

“You’re not going with them?” Scott asks.

He’s taken to hovering outside Wanda’s room, talking to her in an unfamiliarly gentle voice that, to pretty much everyone’s surprise, isn’t half as condescending as it should be. Perhaps it’s tempered by the fact he also steals her desserts if she’s too slow getting to them.

The fussing is sweet, and Scott seems to be getting as much from his attention on Wanda as she is, if not more.

Sam hasn’t the heart to tell him a bedridden Scarlet Witch is a poor substitute for his nine-year-old daughter. Not to mention, he’s not even sure that’s entirely true, if half the stories about little Cassie are to be believed.

Scott stands with him, the door behind them only slightly ajar, bringing them here, right here, to this very moment.

“She’s asleep,” he says, followed quickly by, “You’re not going with them?”

Sam shakes his head.

It’s only been eight days since they reached Wakanda, minus one Captain and one Hawkeye.

Six since Natasha showed up, livid and uncompromising and bruised around the eyes. Four since she left to get Stark.

Eight long, painful days spent willing his body to heal faster, all the while avoiding the blast radius of James Buchanan Barnes’ anxiety, which has mostly been manifesting in terrifying imitations of the Winter Soldier, poised to strike.

Eight days of Wanda’s power going from depleted to overdrive in unpredictable, dizzying bursts of magic. Her last nightmare had nearly rattled the windows of her room right out of their frames. Eight days of Scott getting halfway through another story about Cassie before suddenly having somewhere very important and far away to be.

Sam’s anticipation is like thorns peppering his windpipe. Every swallow tastes of his stomach lining.

He wants to go out there, onto the landing pad on the roof of the hospital, where the jet will be arriving any minute. He wants to, perhaps even _should._

There’s no guarantee Barnes is going to keep a level head around Stark, not even for Steve and Barton.

Then again, Sam’s hardly in a position to break up a spat right now if they get into it. Perhaps letting them fight it out will be for the benefit of everyone.

“Do you think they’re OK?”

Sometimes, Scott’s naivety is the best, brightest thing about him, a thing worth protecting at all costs. Sam finds he can’t bring himself to be the one to dispel it now.

“I don’t know, Tic Tac,” he says, his eyes on the end of the corridor Barnes so recently disappeared down, following it up with a sigh that roughly translates as _I don’t think so._

They stand side by side outside Wanda’s room, waiting impatiently for their friends, the nip of antiseptic and sunlight in their nostrils.

Five minutes pass.

Six, seven, ten, twelve.

After fifteen minutes, Scott shifts around, his hands wringing together.

“You alright?” Sam asks, as a politer reprimand than what he really wants to say.

Scott glances over, rocking back on his heels.

“They’re taking a while.”

“I’m sure Iron Man and the Winter Soldier are just hugging it out,” Sam says dryly.

The joke tastes stale, wrong in his mouth. Despite Scott’s nervous responding laugh, Sam grimaces at himself.

Another few minutes crawl past, and Scott’s jittering gets worse. It’s easier to pretend his fidgeting is the root of Sam’s irritation, and not that Sam’s ready to crawl out of his own skin, too.

Scott cracks his knuckles, one after another.

“If you’re so damn worried, why don’t you go out there?” Sam snaps, instantly regretting it when Scott freezes, head ducked in a wince.

Sam closes his eyes, breathing sharply through his nose.

_Do better, Wilson, _he hears through the buzz of his own anger, the needle pointing him north.

“Sorry, man,” he says through gritted teeth. “I’m just –”

“No, you’re right,” Scott replies, another bounce on the balls of his feet. “I’m not built for the stoic routine.”

That’s almost, perhaps, an insult. Sam decides not to take it for one. He snorts instead, because accidental jibe or not, it’s true. Sam might not be a sniper, might not have perched at ready for six hours trained into his muscles but he’s still a soldier. He learned grade one stoicism during basic.

Scott takes off, leaving a wake of nervous energy behind him. At the end of the corridor he turns back, eyes worrying at the door behind Sam.

“I’ll be here,” Sam reassures him with an extra nod of his head.

Scott looks relieved and embarrassed as he hurries away.

After a moment’s deliberation, Sam pushes at the door he’s promised to guard and steps halfway into the room behind him.

Wanda opens her eyes almost as soon as Sam has her in sight. Her smile is tight, wry and small. The livid burns left around her throat by the collar she’d been locked in stand out starkly against her pillows, her hair tied up high on her head to keep it away from the exposed grazes and blisters that have thus far refused all bandaging.

“You good, Ragtag?” he asks, and her teeth flash shy as he lifts her left hand in an _OK, _followed by several signs he doesn’t know, but her facial expression says everything. “He’s a worrier,” Sam agrees with a one-shouldered shrug. “You should appreciate the low level parenting while you can. Barton’s gonna be your next-door neighbour pretty soon, and we both know he’s gonna be keeping you on a baby monitor for the next five years.”

Wanda rolls her eyes, her torso shaking as she opens her mouth and lets out a reluctant, breathy laugh that has her shaking her hands to shut him up. Sam grins at her, pleased by the creased lightness of her eyes that seems to make the greening bruises on her head disappear.

She pushes her palms together over her stomach, red curls of energy spilling from between her fingers.

“OK, OK, I’ll let you get your beauty sleep,” Sam concedes with a tilted curtsy for her, earning himself one more silent laugh before he steps back out into the corridor.

His grin feels stretched over his skull, weak and underused, and it slides off his face like paint down a wall as soon as he’s turned his back on her.

Alone, he stands sentry in a corridor like they’re not in one of the safest places on the planet and takes several long, steadying breaths. He counts them out, pushing all his energy into remaining still and calm.

Eight days. Heavy and drawn out, his broken arm aching, his bruised ribs twinging. He’s tired in his bones.

There’s been a disorienting disconnect, these past eight days. Wakanda is a veritable paradise, yet the storm cloud of Steve’s absence has laid a thick veil between Sam knowing he’s in paradise and actually appreciating it. He’s been suspended in the limbo of uncertainty, adrift even after escaping the sea.

He hadn’t realized how much he’s come to rely on Steve’s anchoring presence.

His anticipation, thorns in his windpipe.

Sam knows he’s going to hit the ground hard soon, going to punch Steve in his darling hero face for pulling a stunt like that, going to wring Barton’s neck for being so stupid.

Teetering on the edge of his own relief, it takes Sam a few moments too many to notice the bustling flurry of sounds from somewhere out of sight, around the corner of the corridor. There are voices jabbering over each other, mostly in Wakandan but there’s a spatter of English that he can’t quite discern.

One moment, he’s standing alone in the corridor and the next, Scott’s there.

Scott, his face pale, gaze darting restless all about them, as if in search of somebody else.

Sam reaches out his good hand towards him, his stomach clenching when Scott pulls back, autopilot in his eyes.

“Scott?” Sam says, tentative, as a tidal wave of dread threatens to engulf him.

Scott licks his lips, blinking rapidly, and when he opens his mouth to speak Sam thinks about the door, ajar behind him, about the young woman, her eyes wide open and her magic in her hands. He thinks about how he should warn Scott, he should say something, only he doesn’t, he _doesn’t._

Sam’s brain freezes over and his tongue tangles between his teeth and Scott’s mouth opens and he says, says without preamble or premise,

“Hawkeye’s dead.”

For one blessed moment, Sam doesn’t comprehend it. He doesn’t compute the words coming out of Scott’s mouth or even the look on his face as he says it.

He doesn’t know what that means.

Until, from inside the room behind him, shaking scarlet, a sudden scourge of magic that can be felt from every direction pours through the air, rips like a tidal wave. The corridor _shakes, _as the crystalline snap of glass shattering rattles through them. Sam flinches, lunges, elbow knocking into the door but even as it opens, he’s thrown back.

Wanda lets out a terrible, violent scream.

There’s the grinding, metallic shriek of electricity. The lights flicker crimson and white. Sam’s inside the room before he can even think it through, swallowed up in a cloud of blistering energy.

Wanda’s lying on her arching back, her face creased and tear-stricken as her magic pours uncontrollably out of her. Sam’s lungs tighten inside his chest, his battered ribs ache, and he shouts her name through the din of her havoc, Scott on his heels with his hands outstretched as they reach, heedless of anything but the wail echoing through the hospital.

Scott’s voice, hollow in Sam’s ears like an alien language, his dead nerve surprise, blunt trauma contusion.

_Hawkeye’s dead._

*

Later, Sam asks Steve, _Did he go easy? _The way someone asked about Riley, once.

_You know he didn’t, _Steve replies.

And it’s odd, how Steve would say that. That assuming manner, that presumption. Steve’s base belief that there’s no other way Barton would go.

The thing is, Sam maybe could’ve guessed, but he didn’t _know, _not really.

The thing is, Sam never really knew Barton much at all.

*

Tony tells Steve it’s his fault, and Steve tells Tony it’s _his._

They hurl their accusations at each other expertly, striking to draw blood with every word, deaf to Sam’s attempts to rein them in, blind to the way Barnes’ chin hits his chest in a ragged, defensive curl, as if he might curl up and disappear in front of their very eyes.

Sam doesn’t think he’s ever seen them like this before. Never seen Tony so angry, never seen Steve so vicious.

They’re like coyotes, fighting over scraps, desperate to hit first, hit hardest, and Sam, he stands between them and barely, just barely, refrains from saying what’s really on his mind.

(He’s pretty sure Hawkeye would be ashamed of them both.)

*

_He and Steve have a fight? _She asks, like she already knows the answer.

She undoubtedly does.

*

Tony leaves.

Natasha comes back.

They leave Wakanda behind.

A team of SHIELD agents – _New SHIELD, _the agent says, with a secretive _Capital N_ sound to his tone – secure a deal to bring Scott home.

There’s a moment, then, when Sam has a choice.

“You could go, you know,” Steve says, earnest, gentle, determined. The voice of a Captain who’s not ready to lose another soldier.

Only, it’s not a choice. Not really.

Scott’s got a commitment to his daughter, and that takes precedence over everything, of course it does. Sam’s commitments, though. What commitments? Gemma, four dates, who drinks vodka cranberry and smiles like starshine. A loyalty card for the coffee shop that’s at the end of his usual running route; a favourite bartender at Nico’s who always gives him a shot on the house.

A library card he’s used twice.

There’s nothing tying him to D.C.

“I’m here, Captain,” is his only reply, and Steve’s smile is triple parts guilty and relieved.

*

Sam walks into International Fugitive Life with his eyes wide open.

It’s a choice, the _right one _to make. That doesn’t make it suck any less when he’s actually living it.

Principles don’t keep you warm, or fed, or dry, or safe. Quite the opposite, in fact.

*

_“How are they holding up?” _Colonel Rhodes asks.

Sam thinks about the faint dent in the sofa before he went to bed earlier, the only evidence Natasha had been there at all.

“Duct tape and steel wire,” he replies, which wasn’t the Colonel’s question at all, but it’s the best he’s got.

Rhodes laughs dryly.

_“Same here,” _he says.

Sam’s grip on the phone tightens, his words strangled by that horrid, mouth punched urge to apologise all over again.

*

International Fugitive Life was never part of The Plan, as far as Sam Wilson had always been concerned.

It’s rarely a part of any plan, he supposes.

There aren’t many countries left that haven’t signed the Accords, and that list is shrinking fast. The Secretary of State, big boy Ross, hasn’t pulled out his big guns yet. There’s been no call to arms for a manhunt of Steven Rogers and his band of followers, but there’s still time.

It’s been thirty-nine days since they left Wakanda. Forty, since Barnes went back on ice.

Sam doesn’t know if the bastard even bothered talking to Steve before he went ahead with it.

Forty days with Barnes in cryo, Wakanda behind them, and Sam is cooped up in an unforgivingly small apartment in Hougang. Wet season in the North-East Singapore, sticky, soaked. Sweat is beading on his forehead. It’s a nasty kind of heat here; city monsoons, close and pungent. Nothing like the dry, crispy scorch of Wakanda.

Sam keeps shifting uncomfortably, finding new sweat patches. Sitting on a hard, bony wicker chair and staring at the news on the TV.

He hasn’t a hope in hell of understanding it, but he figures so long as he doesn’t see his own face, or Steve’s, or any of the others’, he’s got nothing much to worry about.

On the grease stained table by his shins is a large pitcher of iced tea, stuffed full of mint leaves and lemon slices. He pours a glass for himself, sipping without tasting, aware he’s only going to sweat it out within the hour.

Street noise pours in through the window, poorly concealed by a thin drape, along with the smell of idle cars and wet roads.

Beside him in a matching chair, the Black Widow is doing something halfway between meditating and pretending to sleep. She’s sitting cross-legged, her hands loose on her thighs, her dark red hair sticking to the slick sides of her face and neck. The glass of iced tea Sam poured her hours ago remains untouched.

He doesn’t look at her face for too long, because she can always tell when she’s being watched, and she doesn’t enjoy it one bit.

He doesn’t look at her face for too long, because he doesn’t much like looking at her, these days.

He misses Natasha.

He misses Steve.

He misses his _friends._

*

In Afghanistan, years ago. Before _Save it, Soldier Boy _and before _On your left _and before _You shouldn’t harbour illusions, Sam. _Before Riley scoffs and cheers and says, _Christ, Wilson, where’s the fire?_

Before all that, Sam meets a cocky Second Lieutenant called Grant Rogers.

“My folks were big on the war classics,” Grant says the first time someone makes a joke, rolls their eyes. And the fifth, and the twentieth, and the hundredth.

“Got a big brother called Steven?” Sam asks as he holds out a bottle for him to take.

Grant’s ears pink as he takes it, swigging fast, and the lager fizzes up. He coughs out a rueful blue, “My sister’s called Stephanie.”

The grin that splits Sam’s face is almost painful, it’s so big. He takes a sip of his own beer, collapsing into his chair, and feels the strain of the past seven months sit upon his collarbones and his brow like the entire desert has swallowed him up.

Grant, in a visible act of self-validation that sounds about as practiced as his sister’s name, adds,

“My Pop always said ‘Nam would’ve been a whole other sport if we’d had Captain America on the ground.”

Sam looks at Grant, then. Grant Rogers, named for a hero who died before he hit thirty. Grant Rogers, named for an ideal he’d inherited, built on a world he didn’t.

It’s not the first time Sam’s heard something similar over the years. It hadn’t really sounded right the first time, either. A lot of folks believe that kind of talk. Sometimes, not very often, maybe once or twice that he can recall, Sam has wondered from the outskirts of Kabul how a guy like Captain America would ever fit in a war like this one.

The truth is, Sam has always found it kind of hard to imagine Captain America in any place other than the muddy countryside of central Europe, punching Nazis to a backdrop of white stars and the warble of Sinatra and Fitzgerald. War seems to have gotten a whole lot less righteous, since the original Steve Rogers took his premature leave of it.

Sam doesn’t say any of that, though. He doesn’t rebuke Grant Rogers, or Rogers’ father. He just smiles, the weight of sandstorms heavy on his collarbones and brow, and thinks about home some more.

*

Not very many years later, Sam turns on the TV and sees Steven Grant Rogers’ face, the actual one, the one from the posters.

Still a hero, less than a year after getting thawed from his ice box, knocking out aliens with his shiny shield.

He wonders what Riley’s going to think, and then he remembers Riley’s not thinking anything ever again.

“Aww, fuck that,” Sam tells his empty apartment, switches off the TV and goes for a run instead.

That night, he gets an email from Grant Rogers, brother of Stephanie, offering him a beer and some onion rings. He accepts, because he has to. Between clinking bottles of European import and soggy batter, they talk about super soldiers and upcoming elections and the rising price of gas, pretending not to notice the swarming silences filling the gaps around their cramped corner table.

One day, Sam tells himself, it won’t be so hard to accept.

*

There is a kind of guilt that Sam, while no stranger to it before, is starting to think might live inside him forever.

He remembers Alie, his first ever girlfriend.

Her grin on the first day of junior year, when he held her hand and walked her to Spanish class, even though it made him late for Biology. The way she’d scrunch her hair between her fingers when she was nervous, so that every exam day it would be a knotted mess by the end of school.

The expression on her face at her cousin’s funeral.

Sam didn’t know Alie’s cousin all that well, considering. But Alie’s grief, it was a palpable torment. It ate her up inside and Sam watched, helpless, trying to conjure up better things to say than _Lewis wouldn’t’ve wanted you to be so unhappy, _because in any case, what did he know?

Maybe Lewis was a selfish dick and would’ve loved the attention, even from the afterlife.

Sam had done everything he could, but there’s no fighting other people’s ghosts for them.

And sure, he’d liked Lewis. They’d shared two classes and sometimes they’d sit together at football games when Alie was cheering, and once Lewis got so sick at a party that he called Alie for help and Sam drove out to get him at one in the morning and got grounded for two weeks because of it.

Sam was sad when Lewis died, and he kind of missed him.

But that raw, unstoppable ache that nearly landed Alie in the hospital? Sam never felt that.

And boy, did he feel bad, wiping her tears away and just wishing she’d stop, stop crying and stop hurting, stop _grieving. _Or if not, then wishing he was shedding his own tears, too.

That guilt, some sly shadow of the survivor’s kind. The _I’m sorry you’re dead but my life isn’t all that different because of it _guilt_._

It’s another kind of hurt, one with its own thorns and thistles.

It lives inside Sam, now. In safehouses and unsafehouses and out in the open and crammed in a bus with a cap low over his face, glancing over his shoulder at every corner.

He watches Natasha, her eyes straining out to horizons Sam’s never seen. He watches Steve looking at her, sometimes, with a thousand wounds in his eyes. He watches Wanda’s hands curl up around her red threads of magic like she can trap them, sand grains slipping out of her control.

He watches Scott put a hand on her elbow, steer her like a father missing his daughter, and he knows Scott’s feeling some of that self-same guilt, too.

And Sam? Sam thinks, lonely to himself in the solitude of his unspoken anger:

_Damn you for leaving them, Barton. God damn you for leaving me this mess._

Then, he feels guiltier than before, and he wonders what it would be like, to be crippled by this loss, the way his friends have been.

*

The last thing Clint Barton ever says to Sam is: _Don’t you drop her, Falcon!_

The last thing Sam says back is: _Don’t you lose him, Hawkeye!_

*

They both keep their promises.

Sam thinks it’s probably enough, for him.

Sam thinks that Barton would agree.

*

The thing is, though. There’s this kind of guilt, like the survivor’s kind, the not-for-me kind. Guilt comes in all flavours, all shapes and all sizes.

He doesn’t _notice, _does he? Not for almost a week. He doesn’t notice.

And Barton, yeah, he pays the price, but so does everybody else, too.

*

Sam dies in Wakanda, feeling every hit he’s ever taken, distant sense memory of midnight in Afghanistan, thinking how maybe there is just no good way to go.

He dies without expecting it, his own name ringing in his ears as he tries to call back, to answer Rhodey’s shout.

He is, and then he isn’t.

Sam dies in Wakanda and when he wakes up in the exact same spot, it’s to find Bucky Barnes is standing over him.

“Steve’s not here,” Barnes says without preamble, holding out his right hand to pull Sam up.

His voice is thick, strained; exhausted and terrified and angry. Sam is very briefly reminded of the Barnes who stood outside the morgue only a few short miles away from this very spot, choking on oxygen and grief.

The Barnes who gritted his teeth and stepped inside the coldbox and said, just loud enough for Sam to hear through the cracked open door,

“Steve, let him be. It’s not him. That’s not him anymore. Please. Please, don’t do this to me.”

*

Sam dies in Wakanda but it doesn’t stick.

He wakes up five years later.

*

That, if nothing else, is worth feeling guilty about.

*

Riley Holte is a chatterbox and a goofball and for all of ten minutes upon knowing him, Sam hates his guts.

Then the idiot trips over his own feet and somehow manages to turn it into a neatly caught springing handstand, and all Sam can really think is, _Shit, I gotta get him to teach me that._

Riley agrees happily, seemingly oblivious to Sam’s momentary dislike, but not before a further ten-minute monologue on his personal history as an almost-Olympics-if-not-for-God-damn-Max-freaking-Cartwell-level acrobat. It’s not so much infectious as it is _invasive, _Riley’s cheerful enthusiasm. A bit of a stupid kid, a bit of a sweetheart.

Sam gets used to his monologues. His short stories that are secret novels, his waxing lyrical about his day’s events the way Sam would respond with, _Fine, _would maybe at most tack on a _thanks _afterwards_, _though probably not.

Riley never fucking shuts up and it gets him in shit all the time and Sam occasionally prays for a moment’s peace, right up until the stories stop, and that’s when he’d give anything for another rambling monologue.

The ensuing silence in the gap of Sam’s life is deafening.

*

International Fugitive Life has a lot of stop-starts.

There are a few hurdles that might have inhibited their progress, moments when maybe, just maybe, they could have fixed it before it all went to hell.

Like in the hospital. Like Sam, storming away from the pair of them, from Steve’s forehead touching his knees, and Barnes’ hand on his neck, from the air that’s cracked like a bullet hole through a pane of glass. He storms out, after a retreating back that he just might never see again.

Further down the corridor, two Wakandan nurses politely divert at the sight of the pair of them.

And Sam, Sam catches up with Tony Stark as he strides towards the exit.

_“Stark!” _he shouts, and he doesn’t follow up with _You son of a bitch, _but only because when Stark turns around, it’s already etched deep in his face, tear tracks on his pasty cheeks.

“Save it, Soldier Boy,” Stark retorts brusquely. “I got nothing more for you. I brought you your Captain back. Your spy will get here soon enough. Sorry about your sniper but, you know, two out of three ain’t bad.”

Maybe, if Sam hadn’t seen the wasteland smeared across Stark’s expression a hundred times already, in a hundred different faces, he might have clocked him in the mouth for that one. There’s hurting cruelty and there’s senseless lashing and then there’s Anthony Edward Stark.

He has, though. Sam’s seen it all before.

The devastation contorting in his expression to something better protected. A disguise of self-contempt.

Tony’s going to _leave. _He’s going to take his anger and his guilt and his horror and he’s going to _leave, _and perhaps he will never get over it. Perhaps neither will Steve.

“Go back in there,” Sam says, one hand hanging useless in its sling, the other stabbing a finger back the way they’ve come from, back towards Steve, towards Barnes, towards the only people Tony’s going to be able to goddamn _share _this pain with, not have to carry it the way he seems so desperate to carry the rest of the world all by himself.

Peas in a fucking pod, The Stark and Rogers Show, stuck on reruns for all eternity and Sam Wilson’s their captive audience.

Stark gives him a sarcastic, pained look, shrugging his hands then flinching when he looks down at them, stuffing them out of sight in his pockets.

“No can do, Private Ryan,” he sneers weakly. “I’m all out. Give my regards to Widow, when she shows up. I doubt you’ll be seeing Romanov anytime soon.”

He pauses again, swinging in a half-turn down the corridor. His jaw tightens, eyes full of accusations and hate.

“Ask her if she wants her mug posted to her, or if I should smash it along with everything else.”

Sam doesn’t know what that means, exactly, but he does know Tony Stark well enough to recognize a grimace of self-reproach when it mars his features. Stark saunters away, his body loose, his footfalls heavy.

Sam stays there, utterly still, watching, until Tony reaches the corner, which is when he shouts, “Stark!”

Stark pauses, head tilted towards him, not quite all the way.

“What did you say to Barton, on the Raft?”

For a stretched, dreadful moment, it looks like Stark might actually respond.

He doesn’t.

He takes the corner at speed, footsteps loud on the floor.

Sam doesn’t bother following.

*

They will never speak to each other again.

*

International Fugitive Life starts like this.

Sam’s awake.

He’s awake, because it’s his turn to be awake. It had taken him and Barton all of two days to establish a shared watch duty, despite this agreement being communicated mostly through Barton’s oversimplified sign language and a lot of eyebrow action from Sam in response, to avoid being noticed by their two cell mates.

Scott doesn’t seem to have caught on yet. There’s no telling how much Wanda’s really aware of, at this point.

By now, they’ve got a pretty good system going. Judging by mealtimes and the mean average of their individual internal clocks, they’ve figured they’ve been on the Raft for a day short of three weeks.

Day and night, they had quickly discovered, are loose terms on the Raft.

Night, or what they have come to know as ‘night’, is little more than the hard, white lights of their cells turning to a hazy, police siren shade of blue.

It had made Barton nervous as a spooked horse, the first time the blue lights had flooded the room, and Sam is pretty certain the guy’s had more than one panic attack over it. It’s hard to tell, because Barton’s been taking to crouching in the only corner of his cell Sam has absolutely no visual of for most of the designated Blue Hours.

Sam’s formulated in his head a few questions he’d like to ask Barton about it, starting and ending with _Where the hell is your PTSD diagnosis and why did you agree to this plan you goddamn moron, _only, whatever they say will go straight through the mics to whoever is listening in on them in the hopes of getting some Captain America intel. While Sam likes to think the discovery of a prisoner’s suffering mental health would be cause for some improvements to the accommodation, he doubts that’s the kind of thing they go for at the Raft.

Not to mention, Barton might actually break out of his cell and kill him.

So, they don’t talk about the harsh rip of Barton’s breath when the lights change. They don’t talk about the sniffling whimpers from Scott whenever he stops talking about Cassie, or the aching empty silence from Wanda.

Sam’s awful grateful they don’t talk about whatever shit comes out of his mouth in the muzzled space between his nightmares and his waking thoughts, either.

They talk about other things. Mundane things. Scott tells stories that are probably dangerously close to reality and Barton tells stories that are undoubtedly lies wrapped neatly around seedlings of truth and Sam tries to tell stories that fit somewhere in the middle of that sliding scale.

Truthfully, Sam has a grudging level of gratitude for Barton’s presence, despite his incongruous hang-ups.

He knows the guy is batshit insane, and has a morality bar set much lower than his own – the man has somehow fallen into what might be considered a _relationship_ with the Winter Motherfucking Soldier, for Christ’s sake – but that’s its own comfort, as far as Sam is concerned. People like Clint Barton are resilient and capable. They do what needs to be done.

The guards at the Raft aren’t exactly big on customer service, but they haven’t been outright cruel or abusive, and there’s a part of Sam that wonders what’s going to happen when good ol’ Captain America comes marching in to break them out of here, which will no doubt be at any moment.

Sam rather thinks Steve will have a hard time killing people who really are nothing more than unfortunate enough to be working a shit job for a shit Secretary of State, and he rather thinks he’ll have a hard time, too, when it comes down to it. At least three of the guards have wedding rings, and he overheard two of them talking about a pregnant wife one day during his turn at designated coldish-but-at-least-there’s-soap shower time.

Sam would bet his own freedom that Barton will not have such a hard time doing what needs to be done.

It has not passed Sam’s notice that Steve has an apparent magnetic field for natural born killers, that he himself seems to be in a collection of close friends alongside the Winter Soldier, the Black Widow and Hawkeye. It’s a little unprecedented, truth be told.

People don’t tell horror stories about _the Falcon._ He’s not a ghost story, or a waking nightmare, or a monster under the bed, and that’s exactly how Sam likes it.

He doesn’t kill mostly decent guards who are just doing their jobs and maybe don’t even agree with the Sokovian Accords, whose kids maybe have Captain America posters on their bedroom walls, who call home every night and whisper them bedtime stories and tell them how much they are loved. No, he will leave that task to other, better suited killers, and be disgusted by himself on his own terms.

Sam is aware of his own hypocrisy, that he would comfortably let Barton carry more widows and half-orphaned children on his conscience simply because he’s used to the weight by now. He thinks, perhaps, come light of day, he’ll be ashamed.

That’s for later, though. Not for now.

So instead of worrying about it, Sam sits in his cell, awake because it’s his turn, pretending he can’t hear Scott’s ragged breathing, pretending he _can _hear Wanda, pretending –

The lights change, sudden and bright, the blue disappearing from the walls, replaced by daytime white.

Sam sits up, and when he looks over, he can see across the room Barton standing at the ready, wide awake and hungry, looking all too _eager, _looking like a Harris Hawk about to be cut loose.

“What’s going on?” Scott asks, stumbling up, hands on the clear pane of his cell, rubbing the sleep from his face and shivering. “Do you think something’s happened?”

Sam smirks, and Barton gives him a slow nod before leaning towards the side of his cell that’s closer to Wanda, to murmur quietly, like he’s been doing every day.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Something’s happening alright.”

From the shadows of the far corner, there’s the unmistakable sound of a door hatch opening.

There’s a moment, which might be thirty seconds or thirty minutes, before a figure appears, walking calmly towards him, his eyes loud with victory and anger.

“Sorry I’m late,” Steve says, a shadow of his Captain’s charm in his grin. “Ready to blow this popsicle stand?”

Sam grins, and for the first time in weeks, feels the cool balm of relief under his skin.

*

International Fugitive Life starts with strapping himself into his reclaimed Falcon suit, wings out and curled around him, unsteady in a jet with one screeching engine and a storm overhead, the sea beneath their feet.

“Get them out of here!” Steve bellows.

Scott’s shrunk down in a suit of his own, is tucked into a pocket of Sam’s chest and he’s just going to have to hope the little guy doesn’t get crushed as he wraps his arms around Wanda, the metal choker still locked tight into her throat, her hands sharp and painful digging into his waist.

“Don’t you drop her, Falcon!” Barton roars from the pilot’s seat, where he’s wrestling for control of the jet as the second engine starts to fail alongside the first, his arms corded with the strain, his feet digging down and his eyes wild as they find Wanda’s scrunched up body in Sam’s grip.

“Don’t you lose him, Hawkeye!” Sam shouts back, as the side hatch opens.

The noise rips the air apart, gunfire and ocean and terror, the wind swallows up whatever Steve is shouting. Sam can feel Wanda’s face pressed cold into the hollow of his throat and everything blurs in a rush.

He gets one final glance of Steve grabbing hold of Barton’s arm before he launches himself backwards, out into the battering storm.

*

Maybe it’s _worse, _in a way.

They were less than five hundred kilometres from Wakanda when they got pulled down.

*

_Christ Wilson, where’s the fire? _He said, laughing, and Sam thinks it in his nightmares, hears it amidst the gunfire in the air.

*

He doesn’t _notice._

*

Riley. Riley Holte.

Bit of a stupid kid, bit of a sweetheart. He’s got a laugh that would grind pebbles to sand and an horrendous habit of letting things slide and sometimes his skin is so thin Sam worries he’ll get hurt by a compliment.

He’s not army regular, not in his bones. He’s sports team material, youngest of five; a serial cheater for a father and a mother who works twenty-five hours a day.

Most of the things Sam knows about Riley, he finds out in passing; throwaway lines inconsequential to the important story he’s telling about that time he saved a pigeon or the bartender back home whom he tried to save from leery asshole comments, only to get himself doused with tequila for his _chauvinistic chivalry._

“Ain’t that gratitude,” Sam snorts as he undoes his boots, toes crushed and blistered with his knees wobbling.

Riley grins goofy and pulls out a picture of the bartender in question, who it turns out is now Riley’s girlfriend.

Sam laughs at his dumb ass, long and hard, not entirely free of derision, because of course this stupid kid sweetheart would fall in love with a defensive, trigger happy bartender he failed to rescue.

Sarah, her name is. _Like the Dylan song, _Riley says.

She’s fire and salt, still a bartender and slogging through a master’s degree in fine art; when Sam asks her how in the hell somebody grades _art _within six minutes of meeting her, he gets a splash of tequila for his cheek.

Sam tries to keep in touch with her, once Riley’s gone. Tries to hold on to some part of what they shared, of the person that tied them together.

“I need you to stop coming over,” Sarah tells him, seven weeks after he gets back for good. “I need some time. I’m sorry. It’s too much.”

She’s lost weight, and the trunk in the living room that stores most of her art supplies has a thin layer of dust over the top of it.

Sam nods, tries to unsee her guilty blush as she scratches at the tattoo on her neck and sinks into her ribcage, her collar bones, her shoulders.

“Of course,” he tells her. _Of course. _“Anything you need.”

He leaves Sarah’s house, firecrackers on his heels, and he never sees her again.

She still sends a card on his birthday, every year, and when it’s been three years to the day, she sends him a postcard sized portrait with her signature in the corner, black and white, of that stupid kid sweetheart they both loved and lost.

*

He gets out of the game for a good reason.

He gets back in it for another.

_Riley would be proud, _Riley’s brother tells him, when Sam calls a few weeks later.

To be honest, Sam’s not so sure. It’s a nice thought all the same.

*

Sam meets Hawkeye for the first time on a very, very difficult day.

Barely back in the game and his newly re-acquired Falcon gear has been destroyed, courtesy of one Winter Soldier, and he watches the Helicarriers smash to pieces with a lingering sense of relieved terror that tastes of adrenaline and dismayed relief, in the company of Natasha Romanov and Nicholas Fury.

Fury brings the chopper down in an inconvenient stretch of ground close enough to the Potomac’s ruptured banks to hear the crashing of the water. Romanov is out before the blades have stopped spinning, talking to someone in her ear. Presumably Hill.

Sam follows, determinedly not thinking about how long a super soldier might be able to hold his breath for, if he was even still alive when he hit the river.

She’s nearly silent on her feet, her voice a low murmur, and Sam doesn’t catch a word of it until he’s at her shoulder.

“…west of your position. He was in the third carrier, possibly with the Soldier. I know. Yes, Hawkeye, I’m aware of that. That’s what _you’re _here for.”

So, not Hill, then.

Natasha briefly switches to Russian, which Sam does not speak at all however by her tone of voice he’s pretty sure he’s getting a crash course in expletives.

She’s walking now, eyes darting to and fro with her weapon held near her hip. When Sam levels with her pace, she tips her chin to the left, towards a clearing in the trees.

“Six hours is plenty of time,” she says abruptly and Sam frowns at her, bemused, only to realise she’s still talking to Hawkeye, who must be somewhere close by. “You survived twelve minutes in Sarajevo.”

Despite the cool cut of her quick eyes, Sam can see a tiny quirk at her mouth. To hear her tone, he’d think she was dealing with a particularly unwelcome enemy, but that tic, that upturn at the corner, a bigger tell than anything she’s given away yet.

Sam’s not arrogant enough to think he’s seeing anything more than what Natasha’s letting him see.

He scans the clearing as they approach it. His ribs are aching, and he takes in careful, shallow breaths as he holds himself ready. The immediate threat of HYDRA’S civilisation-ending domination might be nullified, but the fight is far from over and Steve’s somewhere out there, and so is the weapon wearing his best friend’s face.

Sam can’t even be mad at the asshole, because Steve had admitted it, hadn’t he? He’d _said _he wouldn’t stop Barnes, actually said it, and Sam hadn’t fought him on it, hadn’t known how or if he really could.

God knows, he wouldn’t ever want to be told to put down a threat that looked like Riley.

They step out together to the embankment, weapons raised, staring at the choppy water swelling with the wreckage of Project INSIGHT. Sam takes it in, and despite the magnitude of their success he can’t find the glory in it, only the relief. It’ll have to be enough for now.

Beside him, Natasha moves with predatory suddenness, her voice just as quiet but much sharper than before.

“Are you – where? We’re coming.”

She doesn’t even bother signalling for Sam, who covers her flank as she takes off at a clip downstream. The water licks at their ankles and Natasha speaks just loud enough for Sam to hear her, which can’t be an accident.

“Eyes out, Hawkeye, we don’t know if the Soldier will still be following orders. If he’s there, do not engage. Clint – _Clint! _Acknowledge me. Do_ not _engage._ Acknowledge.”_

With one final Russian word that Sam would bet his life savings is a variation of the word _moron, _Natasha starts sprinting.

“He’s found Rogers,” she drops over her shoulder. “He’s at the water’s edge. No Soldier.”

Sam, running behind her with his eyes on all hands of the clock, huffs through the twinges in his torso.

“Not that he can see,” he mutters darkly.

The Soldier’s a goddamn sniper. What are the odds he’s just waiting until they’re all together so he can pick them off like fish in a barrel?

Apparently, this either hasn’t occurred to Hawkeye or Natasha, or they simply don’t care.

Sam always thought he was the kind of guy who knew better than to chase reckless redheads into the throes of danger, but it seems he is as foolish as First Lieutenant Holte always said he was. He chases the whip ribbon of Natasha’s hair along the riverbank, feet splashing in the water and gun heavy in his hands.

Up ahead, he spots a man at the water’s edge.

Two men, in fact. One heaving the weight of the other with both hands, hindered by the fact he has an actual recurve bow in one of his hands.

It’s not that Sam didn’t _know _Hawkeye was an archer. It’s just, well. What a cumbersome weapon.

He’s tall, even hunched over Steve’s unconscious weight. Dark blond, with a glower Fury would probably be proud of; a peppering of scratches over his left cheek and a nasty cut in his lower lip.

By the time Sam gets to them, Natasha and Hawkeye are already arguing in vicious Russian, made all the more confusing by the fact they also seem to be working in perfect synchronicity as they pull Steve further up the bank and start checking his injuries, as well as each other’s.

When Sam comes to a stop beside them, scanning the surrounding area and, yup, _no Soldier, _like that fucking means a thing, Hawkeye leans out of his little dance routine long enough to nod at him, pressing pause on his anger to say in a neutral shade of resentment _Wilson, I’m Barton, _before snapping back at Natasha in what sounds more like Polish than Russian.

Sam looks down at Steve, whose head is being cradled – no, _checked _– by one of Natasha’s sweeping, gentle hands. He’s a goddamn mess.

Actually, he’s unrecognisable, other than his uniform, which has more than one bullet hole in places where bullet holes usually mean _dead. _Less skin than bruise, more blood outside than inside, who knows how long he’s been out for, how long he was underwater.

For a moment, Sam is frozen, wrenched from his body to a place where blood is gritty with sand grains and sand is wet and red. His breath is caught dry in his throat, a fist of fright wrapping around his windpipe only –

_“Sam,” _Natasha says, firmly, neither warm nor cold, just there, just loud enough to be heard.

Water laps at his feet where he stands, two pairs of eyes watching him, cool mirrors reflecting back at him, grey and green.

“Contact Fury, we need to get Steve somewhere safe.”

“We need to get him to a _hospital,” _Sam says, words scratching out of his throat.

“He’s just pulled HYDRA out of SHIELD by the roots, exposed an entire agency’s secrets to the _world, _and you want to take him somewhere public?”

Natasha phrases it like a question, but it’s all judgement and Sam knows it.

Before he can argue or agree, Hawkeye looks back down at Steve and mutters: “Well, actually _you _were the one to expose everyone’s secrets.”

“Barton,” Natasha says sharply, and Hawkeye’s jaw locks tight around whatever else he has to say about that. “Contact Fury. We’ll get him to a safehouse and have a doctor look at him there.”

One of Steve’s eyes has pretty much disappeared in the wreck of swelling. Both of his cheekbones look displaced, his jaw cracked. His entire abdomen is soaked in blood.

Sam swallows the spiky lump in his throat.

“Where will we take him?”

“I’ll deal with it,” Hawkeye says. He’s got one hand on Steve’s sternum, the other still holding his bow, and both eyes on the crowded trees ahead of them. “Tell Fury I’m taking him home.”

Sam raises his eyebrows at that, unsure whether Hawkeye means his own home, or Steve’s. Possibly he means _Fury’s._

Does Fury even have a home right now?

Hell, does Steve?

He opens his mouth to suggest actually, Steve’s already come to _Sam’s _home once when in need, and maybe they should be going there, but decides against it. Now is not the time to start testing patience.

Sam rarely feels out of his depth, and refuses to around people just because they run around calling themselves _Avengers. _This is different, though, and he knows it.

It’s impossible to remain oblivious to the tension crackling between Romanov and Barton, their livid anger and the push-pull of worry that has their hands drifting towards each other and away in a well-established routine. He’s not in over his head because he isn’t an Avenger, but he _is _in over his head stuck between two people who look like they’re either about to kill each other, or everybody in their immediate vicinity. Possibly both.

He is not among Avengers, now, nor is he among soldiers. He’s in the company of assassins, wrathful ones at that.

Sam glances back down at the ruined Steve Rogers, aftermath of a Soldier he almost certainly didn’t even try to fight back against.

_I don’t know if I can do that, _he said, and Sam believed him, believed him and did _nothing._

Despite the steady glare of his attention watching out for threats, Hawkeye’s fingers clench and flex anxiously when they come away blood-soaked from Steve’s uniform.

Sam steps aside, to contact Fury. Tells him, “_Hawkeye said he’s taking him home,” _and Fury’s only response is, “_Tell him to stay there for now.”_

With nothing more to do than wait, he kneels beside Steve’s legs, useless, until Hawkeye asks him to take over. Sam presses down into the wound cutting Steve Rogers through the middle, while Natasha resets the fingers of his left hand, and lets the aches of the day crash over his head.

Hawkeye puts a bloody hand on his shoulder for just a moment, at first seemingly just a comfort, but then, then.

Sam looks to where his attention is being directed, where Hawkeye points his bow.

A set of boot prints, deep and heavy in the mud, leading away from the water and into the trees.

“Please tell me they’re yours,” he says with futile hope.

Hawkeye’s got an awful mean laugh. One note, one syllable, blunt.

“Someone had already pulled Steve out by the time I got here,” is all he says.

Sam looks at the prints in the mud, imagines the weight of the man pressing them in. Imagines the strength it would take to drag a deadweight Captain America through, up and out of a current thrashing river and onto the sludge of the bank. Strength of a super soldier, surely.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sam says, and Hawkeye gives another of those laughs.

Maybe it’s not mean. Maybe it’s something else.

“You should call Alma,” Natasha says, and it must be to Hawkeye because Sam doesn’t have a clue who that is.

“Already did,” Hawkeye replies curtly without looking at her. “I’ve called a lot of people.”

Sam catches her stony expression out of the corner of his eye.

She doesn’t respond.

*

Eight days later, Sam steps outside into the pre-dawn light for his morning run to find Captain America standing in his front yard. He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt and dark jeans, a baseball cap that does absolutely nothing to disguise him.

His face is exactly the way it was before the Winter Soldier smashed it in, except perhaps a little more downturned than before. His grief, a little easier to read, though it’s entirely possible it was always there.

For a moment, they stare at each other, before Steve clears his throat.

“I, uh. I listened to your recommendation. Troubleman?”

In spite of all attempts to prevent it, Sam’s mouth does something that might be labelled a grin.

“Yeah?” he asks, folding his arms across his chest. “What’s the verdict?”

Steve mirrors him, arms and mouth, shrugging.

“Got any more recommendations?”

Sam laughs, pulling back into his house and gesturing for Steve to follow.

His run can wait. He’s got time.

“Man, do I _ever. _Who’s been in charge of your movie education? I bet they haven’t even shown you _Do The Right Thing_ yet. Wasters.”

Steve follows him inside, weary feet and bright eyes. His laughter, something close to believable.

*

International Fugitive Life is about as glamorous as Sam would’ve guessed it would be – that is to say, _not at all _– and even more like a haunted game of foxhunting than he’d ever imagined.

It is pervasive, invasive, the spectre that resides between them all, this collection of International Fugitive Lifetimers.

They split up at the Wakandan border, rendezvous in eight days.

Sam teams up with Scott, and he hates the shrapnel of relief that beds itself deep in his chest when Steve makes that call.

At their first stepping stone, they hunker down in an apartment in the suburbs of Port Elizabeth, outsourced by a friend of King T’Challa’s.

Under different circumstances, Sam might have laughed at Princess Shuri’s overt reaction to her brother’s use of the word _friend. _As it is, though, Sam just shakes the King’s hand gratefully, asks him to pass on his thanks to this mysteriously helpful Nakia, and wishes him the best.

Scott is subdued and sunburnt when they reach the apartment. He drops immediately to the couch upon entry and leaves it up to Sam to do a perimeter sweep, which he pretends to be annoyed by but, honestly, even if Scott had done one, Sam would have done it himself anyway again.

It’s a raw, exposed wound sensation, being separated from Steve again so soon. Unpleasant, the dark and terrible knowledge that the other three are out there, together, interlocking crossbeams relying on one another to stay upright.

The kitchen taps of the apartment are stiff; the water tastes of the pipes.

Sam pours and gulps three glasses before bringing one to Scott.

Scott’s back has sunk down to the seat cushions of the couch, his head propped up and his legs jutting out. He holds the water in both hands, the glass pressed against the peeling bridge of his nose.

Sam sinks down next to him, watching the blinds tap restless against the window. He wrestles for a while against the absurd urge to turn on the burner phone. Stupid risk, pointless. Unnecessary.

God, but he hopes they’re OK.

“Don’t know why it feels so wrong,” Scott says after a while. His voice is sand hoarse, unfamiliarly stilted.

Sam looks down at the crown of his head.

“What do you mean?” he asks, like he just can’t help it, and maybe he can’t. It’s in him, now. This well of care, the cage of his ribs no barrier to protect his bruising heart.

Scott shrugs, pressing the broad side of the glass to his cheekbone next.

“It’s not like he’d have come with us, would he? He’d have stayed with Barnes.”

There’s some truth in that.

And a bit more, too: if he’d stayed, Barnes probably wouldn’t have opted to go back into cryo-freeze, either.

Scott lets out a long breath, then gulps his water. Once the glass is empty, he holds it to the centre of his forehead.

“I need to get home,” he says and Sam agrees.

“We’ll get you there.”

Fuck if he knows how, but they will, they’ll get him there. Christ, they deserve one win, don’t they?

*

Sam honestly has next to no clue how it happened; how circumstances could shift so drastically, to go from Hawkeye’s bow pointing along the line of those heavy boot prints up the Potomac riverbank, to the swollen red eyes of James Barnes standing outside a morgue in Wakanda.

Seems unkind to ask, at the time. Then, there’s no time at all.

It’s years before he finds out. Years and years and years.

The world ends and kickstarts again in three snaps of three fingers.

Sam dies and so does Barnes only they come back, and the world is changed, and so are the people that matter the most to them.

At the funeral, both of them stand in the shade of an elm, watching Steve sit in the grass, suit wrinkled and rolled up at the elbows, making daisy chains with Morgan Stark while he tells her a fairy tale about a tin man that saved the world. A little further away, the prevailing and indomitable Pepper Potts has her arms around Colonel James Rhodes, almost as if she’s comforting him.

There’s little, Sam has come to learn, that Pepper Potts cannot do, and do better than everybody else. It should be unsurprising, that this is much the same, that she is as she has always been. A survivor, the enduring constant.

Sam turns his head and looks at Barnes and sees an expression he’s seen before.

It’s not his place, it’s _not, _but Sam’s made a living doing and saying things it’s not his place to do or say. Besides, he’s pretty sure the only other person asshole enough to actually _say _it is dead and buried, now.

“You know, I don’t think anybody would be opposed to having a proper funeral for Clint.”

Barnes doesn’t react, at first. His eyes are soft and heavy on the side of Steve’s face, and Morgan’s. He watches them while they link their chains, the little girl’s face filling up with surprised delight when Steve loops them around her head in a floral crown.

For a moment, Sam thinks Barnes is going to walk away without acknowledging he’s spoken.

Then,

“I can’t think of anything worse.”

Barnes almost smiles as he says it, so close to a smile, the stretch of his mouth around those dry words, Brooklyn in the summertime, torched stone. When he turns to look back at Sam, there’s no anger there, only sadness, as long as the years of his life.

“How’d it happen?”

Sam bites his tongue hard but it’s too late to retract the question. His panic must register in his face because Barnes actually laughs and for all it’s not a happy sound, some of the sadness slips away. He watches Steve for another few moments.

“How does anything happen?” he asks, bullshit answer to a bullshit question, truth for truth. He’s right, of course. It’s chemicals and circumstance, every time. “It just did.”

Sam doesn’t know what he’d been expecting. It certainly wasn’t for Sergeant James Barnes, the Winter Soldier himself, to start waxing lyrical in the middle of a crowded garden about a man he knew and maybe loved for less than five percent of his too-long-life.

It just seems unfair, is all. It’s just _unfair._

_Sorry about your sniper, _Tony said in the corridor of that hospital, two years ago – _seven, _damn, seven years ago, now.

Barnes turns to face Sam properly, reaches up unexpectedly and claps his left hand on Sam’s shoulder.

“You’re not the worst person to commiserate at a funeral with, Wilson,” he says, looking gruff and genuine as he nods once and turns, walking away towards the water, where Wanda is standing alone.

It might actually be the nicest thing Barnes has ever said to him.

Sam watches Barnes reach Wanda, watches her tilt her head without quite turning. He watches just long enough to see their shoulders make contact, before turning to scan the crowd.

At the base of the veranda, he sees her, watching with idle curiosity.

When Sam catches Natasha’s eye, he offers her a cautious smile. Her cool green eyes, blinking twice, before she turns away.

*

_Hey, _she said with a smirk in her voice the first time they met, as she stared out of the passenger window of her fancy car and made jokes at her war hero friend’s expense.

*

In Wakanda, after they get them back. After Wanda’s finally fallen asleep and Steve’s finally woken up. After Stark has absconded and Barnes has secreted himself away to the mercy of Princess Shuri’s investigations. After Scott has flatly refused to leave the hospital zone and T’Challa has personally delivered Sam a cup of sweet tea like it’s in any way acceptable for a king to carry someone else’s drinks.

After all this, when the days have bled together, Natasha comes back.

She arrives late in the evening, and Sam only knows because he’s the first person she seeks out.

This is surprising, but he doesn’t show it. Couldn’t turn her away if he wanted to.

She’s wearing fresh tac gear, undoubtedly stored in the jet because there’s no way she’s stopped at a room between the landing pad and the balcony Sam’s been sitting on for nearly three hours without moving. She lets herself in and he hears her, has only to turn his head and recognise the dark red of her hair scraped back off her face.

Natasha takes a seat beside him as the evening drops quickly into night.

The balcony overlooks the city, and fields beyond, and Sam’s certain he’s never seen a sight more beautiful but he can’t bring himself to look, now, not with Natasha Romanov sitting so close. She’s watching the last of the sunshine as it splashes her pale face golden.

She doesn’t turn away from it when she speaks. Her voice is unchanged, is steady unlike Sam’s heart.

“Where’s Iron Man?”

Sam doesn’t bother asking how she knows, hasn’t ever bothered asking how she knows anything.

“Gone,” he tells her. “Left.”

Natasha’s sitting squarely upright, her spine rigid and her fingers taut around each other in her lap. She tilts her head, just so, like a curious young bird though she’s never looked older, never looked less curious in her life.

“He and Steve have a fight?”

Sam laughs even though he tries not to and the sound is harsh in his own ears, too loud. Flinches at his own reaction.

“If you can call it that. More like hurling blame around to see what stuck.”

“Each other, or themselves?”

“A little of both.”

Finally, Natasha looks at him. She turns her head, her acid green eyes. She looks at him and she searches him and it’s known only between herself and powers beyond them what she finds there. Sam feels like he’s got nothing left to offer, but that’s OK, because Natasha’s never asked anything of him before, not since a shower and a place to sleep when everybody she knew was trying to kill her.

“That was selfish of them,” she says pointedly.

Sam grimaces, bitter as the taint of her eyes.

“Yeah, well. They’re both selfish men.”

Natasha accepts that with another tip of her head and says: “They wouldn’t be very good martyrs if they weren’t.”

And hell, if that’s not the most truthful thing he’s heard since Scott told him what had happened.

He keeps staring at Natasha, at her face stretched thin, all bones in a way he’s never seen her before. She glances to the last of the light, up to the stars as they glisten in their millions, as if light pollution were a thing that only happened to other places.

Maybe it is.

Sam’s beyond putting anything past Wakandans, anymore.

He just stares at Natasha, until she’s bristling, until he knows she’s going to tell him to stop and that’s when he tells her, because he _has _to, because he _must, _because who else will but him? He tells her,

“Nobody expects you to be OK, you know.”

It’s the truth, of course it is, nothing but the truth for this woman who has lost, lost like Sam can’t comprehend, not even with all his vast experience at it, but his truth has a terrible countereffect.

Rather than concede to it, rather than be comforted by it the way he had intended, whatever minor vulnerability might have been on show in her posture and her expression vanishes. Natasha steels over, absolutely unyielding when confronted with so bold a gift as kindness.

When she looks at him, when she stares into his eyes unflinching, he sees a woman who has killed too many times to count, who will again without hesitation. When she speaks, she’s a woman he has never met before.

“Do not ever patronise me like that again.”

It’s a hard-won battle, not to immediately apologise to her.

But he can’t, he mustn’t, he has to hold out. She might not want it, but Sam will be damned if he denies her comfort all the same. Doesn’t matter if she throws it back at him, if she throws Sam away with it, she deserves it and she needs it and he’ll keep on offering it to her even if it’s never taken to heart.

He remembers the hiss of Russian across Steve’s unconscious body, two years ago, flung vindictive and worrisome; how Barton and Natasha had battered each other with the force of their love for one another, even if Sam hadn’t exactly recognised it at the time for what it was. She had thrown Barton’s love back, too, but he’d kept giving it anyway and that’s what Sam is going to do, now.

Before he can do as much, though, Natasha beats him to their primary concern.

“Where’s Steve?”

Sam would like nothing more than to believe he’s capable of lying to her successfully, but he’s tried that before to his own detriment.

“He’s in the morgue,” he tells her, defeat in his shoulders, in his lungs. “He won’t leave.”

She’s gone in an instant, just as silently as she arrived and twice as fast. He thinks about following her, or about telling her not to go, but the truth is, he wants her to. He really, really wants her to go. Wants her to go and wants her to deal with it, with their stubborn, selfish friend, whose blast radius is too big to risk an implosion.

Steve wouldn’t leave when Sam asked. He would not listen to T’Challa, nor Shuri, nor any of their doctors.

If Natasha doesn’t succeed, well.

He’s going to have to ask Barnes to do it.

*

“Please, don’t do this to me,” Barnes begs, actually _begs,_ while Sam stands outside the door, useless, cursing selfish martyrs and their graves.

*

Steve sends Stark a phone with a personal love note that Sam pretends not to read and pretends not to have opinions on and pretends not to want to point out that it would take five minutes after the end of the world for Stark to actually _use _it.

Sam pretends a lot of things, these days.

So, instead of mentioning Steve’s naivety to his face, Sam talks to Natasha, who talks to some people Sam’s going to pretend she isn’t on a first name basis with.

He gets a phone and he sends it to Colonel James Rhodes, who will at least call five minutes _before _the end of the world.

*

It’s been three months, three weeks and four days, when Colonel Rhodes calls for the first time.

It’s been months and weeks and days and Sam’s lying awake dreaming up nightmares when his phone rings. His body surges, flail of flapping limbs as he rolls out of bed towards his bag, from which a very faint ringing is emanating.

He answers quickly, praying to all the mercy of his grandmother’s God above that everyone else is still too asleep to have heard it across the house they’re holed up in, and tucks himself back under the covers like a child staying up past their bedtime.

“Colonel,” he says, probably a little too breathless.

_“First Lieutenant Wilson,” _Colonel Rhodes says, and Sam can’t help the tremor of shame that rumbles through him to hear his tired voice.

“Think it’s just Sam at this point, sir.”

_“Yeah, OK, which makes me just plain Rhodey,” _the Colonel replies, like there’s any chance Sam’s ever going to stoop to calling the man by anything other than his earned and deserved title.

When Sam lies awake, dreaming up nightmares, he dreams up a lot of things, but lately it’s been a whole lot of two men falling through the sky, shot down. One, because Sam wasn’t fast enough. The other, because Sam was too fast.

“Sir,” he says, biting through all the speeches he’s rewritten time and again on the road in his head and gets out only the words that matter most. “I’m so sorry.”

_“That’s not why I called, Sam,” _Rhodes says, admonishment like a parent, like a CO, like a friend.

Sam swallows back the words clogging his throat, bitter as burnt caramel on his tongue.

The house is creaking quiet; their month is almost up; they’ll need to move on soon. Scott has been safely waved off, shepherded by a mysterious _New SHIELD _whose brief presence has left Natasha despondent. Not that despondent-Natasha is all that different from pleased-Natasha, or enraged-Natasha, these days.

She’s greying out, slowly, before their very eyes. Each emotion hazing distorted until it is much the same as any other.

Sam wonders if the Colonel knows anything about SHIELD’s resurgence, or if he should keep his silence. He wonders, idly, if they fall under some subsection clause bullshit of the Accords.

_“How are they holding up?”_ Rhodes asks, before Sam can break that one down to bite size.

There’s no sense in lying. Rhodes can’t possibly believe they’re anything close to resembling OK.

They’re burning through safehouses and living off scraps of mutual support. They’ve scrubbed out four old HYDRA bases, uncovered and eliminated two plots to draw in and wipe out Iron Man, shouted at each other about pointless things and it took Sam two months to figure out it was the smell of his morning coffee that kept driving Steve out of the room every goddamn day.

So, when Rhodes asks, _How are they holding up?_

Sam honestly wants to reply, _I have no idea._

Instead, he laughs weakly and says: “Duct tape and steel wire.”

The Colonel chuckles in return.

_“Same here,”_ he replies, and Sam gets smacked in the mouth with another urgent need to apologise. _“It’s best if I don’t know where you are, but, could you do me a favour, Sam?”_

“Anything, sir.”

Dangerous words, perhaps.

These are dangerous times.

_“Could you check in, maybe? Just a call, or hell, a text. Once a month or so. I know – I know things are a mess. I’ve got no clue how we’ll ever fix it. But I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to you guys. And neither will Tony.”_

Sam blinks, shifting deeper under his covers in the pitch dark, the air hot and his lungs unsteady. It feels like his whole bed is floating in the open sea.

He’s not sure how to feel about that. Something already has happened to them.

They’re exiled, they’re _fugitives. _They’ve lost one of their teammates, they’ve watched another shut himself up in cryogenic stasis like it hasn’t been the implement of his own torture for decades. Natasha doesn’t eat and Steve doesn’t talk and Wanda’s not doing either.

Sam’s about to spend the anniversary of Riley’s death _not _going to his grave first thing in the morning for the first time since it happened and all he can think about is how Sarah’s going to know, because he always leaves daffodils and when she visits and doesn’t see those bright yellow flowers she’s going to know he hasn’t been to visit.

So much has happened to them, to them all.

All of them. Rhodes included.

Sam’s breath catches damp in his teeth, stinging at the memory of Rhodes plummeting through the air, the streak of light as Tony raced to catch him in time.

Something’s happened to all of them, and as for the rest of it, well.

Sam thinks about the tear tracks on Tony Stark’s pale face, the flinch of his whole body when Steve told him, shouting hoarse and wretched: _You left them all alone._

Yes, Tony wouldn’t forgive himself.

A part of Sam, a very real and bruised part of him, is certain he’s never going to forgive Tony for what has happened to them already.

Despite this, there’s another part of Sam, a very real and resilient part of him, that knows Tony probably wouldn’t accept forgiveness, even were it offered to him.

Jesus, what a mess.

_“Sam?”_ Rhodes prompts, when his dazed silence drags too long.

“Won’t you – wouldn’t I be compromising you?”

Rhodes hums delicately, could be amused, could be stalling, could be anything.

Tiredness scratches at Sam’s soul like a cat at a post, relentless.

_“I think you’ll find the stipulations of the Accords are very clear, Sam. If I see you, I am to arrest you. If I know where you are, I am obliged to report it to the UN. I fail to see how getting a text from an unknown number once a month saying _We’re fine _is in any way meeting that criteria.”_

The problem, Sam realises, is that he’s been thinking of this man as Colonel James Rhodes, decorated soldier and pilot.

But that’s not who he is, is it? He said it already. He’s _Rhodey. _He’s Tony Stark’s best friend. If anyone has experience is bullshitting The System, it’s the oldest friend of the man who built a legacy on breaking the rules.

“Sure, yeah,” Sam says, feeling some semblance of a smile tugging at his lips. “I can do that.”

For a moment, they both wait. An ache, awkward as a broken limb and twice as painful. Sam feels it inside his chest, the loss of what they had, all of them, together, that _togetherness._

He wants to ask how everyone is. Vision, and Pepper, even Tony. He wants to ask if Maria Hill is still there, if she had known about the threats to Iron Man, if she knows who took care of them. He wants to know if Tony is even aware of how deep he cut Steve with his parting words. He wants to know how deep Steve cut Tony with his own.

_“Sam,” _Rhodes says. _“I know you’ve got a talent for holding people together, when they’re falling apart. It’s admirable. They are goddamn lucky to have you.”_

Sam shrinks a little into himself; feels that hot squirm of embarrassment and joy and relief and melancholy. The trepidation of whatever is going to come out of Rhodes’ mouth next.

When Rhodes sighs, it’s so quiet Sam’s convinced he wasn’t supposed to hear it.

_“You can’t carry it for them. They’re gonna get there, all of them. So will you. But you can’t carry it for them.”_

Sometimes, Sam feels like such a fucking fraud.

Times like this, when Colonel James Rhodes talks like he thinks Sam might burn himself out with all the _help _he’s dishing out, talks like he thinks Sam’s doing squat.

Sam’s not _carrying _anything, he’s barely keeping up. He’s got three people clawing their way through grief, the kind that hit Sam so hard he got himself a discharge to escape it, and all Sam’s showing for their pain is a faint regret he never got to thank Barton for keeping his promise.

Sometimes, just sometimes. Such a fucking fraud.

“I’ll do my best,” he says, all wrong, choked up; despising himself and every ounce of his shame for letting a man like Colonel Rhodes think he’s that selfless, that _good._

_“Take care of yourself, Sam,”_ Rhodes tells him, all sincerity, all truth, as if Sam isn’t the person responsible for the way he plummeted down to earth like a clanging metal ragdoll dropped from the clouds.

“You too, Colonel.”

_“It’s just Rhodey, Sam,” _Rhodes says, and his voice is lighter than air, than the radio waves that separate them.

He ends the call before Sam can reply.

Sam drops the phone into his lap, still curled up under the covers, six years old with a torch in his hand and a book under the pillow.

He sits there all night, his arms around his legs and his forehead on his knees, overheated and overwhelmed, listening to the darkness, until it turns to day.

*

Sam stands outside the morgue like a sentry, all too similar to before. Bears witness to things he won’t ever repeat.

_Please, please don’t do this to me, _Barnes begs of Steve in tones of childhood longing.

And when that doesn’t work, the pain tangles sideways, and the rage of the Soldier rises to the surface, obliterating everything else.

_How dare you do this. How _dare _you make me come down here you fucking asshole. I don’t want – I didn’t want to see him like this. I never wanted to. You selfish, selfish asshole. How dare you do this to me._

*

They cremate him in Wakanda. Ashes scattered at the crest of a southern ridge of mountains, where the birds of prey hunt and soar, far out of the panthers’ reach.

And Steve, for all the selfishness he may house in his bones to cradle the magnitude of his martyr’s guilt, he probably says it best.

“I’m sorry we can’t take you home, Hawkeye. I know they’re the wrong skies. But you won’t be alone here. You’ll never be alone.”

*

_New SHIELD, _when their paths finally intersect, comes with a friendly face.

A woman, who waits for them in a warehouse and keeps her hands visible along with the gun holstered at her thigh and the knife in her boot. She’s got bronze-gold hair that’s cut short, severe around an angular jaw line, and her eyes barely leave Natasha as they approach.

“Mockingbird,” Natasha says from a safe distance, coming to a stop with Steve at her right and Sam at her left. Beside Sam, Wanda stands close enough that her arm brushes his, Scott is at Steve’s right, hands wringing loudly, anticipatory. He’s already got his bags packed, eager, _desperate._

Sam’s pretty desperate on his behalf, too.

Scott hasn’t seen his daughter in months, had become convinced he never would again.

_Mockingbird,_ a fitting name for the glint in her eyes, takes them in with a sweep of her eyes.

“Captain America,” she says with a nod, and Steve makes a startled sound.

“It’s you,” he says.

“It’s me,” she replies with enigmatic pride as she smiles at him indulgently. “I have to say, I had hoped we’d get the full family reunion.”

This, she says to Natasha, and Sam doesn’t turn to look at her face but he wants to, Christ he does. He wants to reach out and take her goddamn hand even though he knows it won’t be trembling, because she is the Black Widow, and the Black Widow does not tremble.

There’s no reason for this Mockingbird to know the truth, unless Natasha has chosen to reveal it and she must have a reason not to.

If Natasha wants this fancy new secret society to think Barnes isn’t in lockdown, or to think Barton isn’t dead, well. That’s for her to decide, and Sam’s going to back her up. He can only pray that Steve will, too.

“No matter,” Mockingbird says to her absent response. “You must be Mr Lang. I’ll be escorting you back to the United States. Our Director has worked out a deal for you that will be to everybody’s benefit.”

“Director?” Steve asks, all authority and accusation.

Sam chances a double-take, then, to see as curious a look on Natasha’s face as Steve’s.

“Fury?” Sam adds, to a ringing laugh from Mockingbird that is directed solely at Natasha.

“Not Fury,” she replies. Her smile is beautiful, like belladonna amongst rose bushes. “I’m sure you’ll approve. Mr Lang, are you ready?”

Of course he is, they all know he is, but honestly, Sam hadn’t expected it to be so _quick. _It’s too easy, too easy when the past few months have been such a slog, such a punishing ritual of hiding and running and fighting and fleeing. Border crossings and locked doors and cramped boats across wide rivers.

Scott takes a step forward, feet stuttering over the concrete as he looks to Steve, as if for permission.

Permission Steve suddenly seems none too ready to give.

“Who’s the Director?” Steve asks and Mockingbird, flinty and bright, gives a delighted curl of a laugh.

“I told him you’d need more,” she says, smug and lovely, her words hanging in the rafters with the pigeons.

Projecting every movement with a slowness that speaks of expected hostility, she lifts her hand to the comm unit in her ear and says, “Sir, you’re going to need to step inside. They’ll need visual confirmation.”

For a moment, there is nothing.

Sam looks at Steve and Natasha’s faces, one curious and the other too flatly blank to be believable. Wanda, beside him, is taking in the warehouse at large with obvious turns of her head, suspicious of the breath of the wind.

Scott hovers a metre in front of their position, visibly torn, positively thrumming with energy. He’s so close to home, stalled at the last second and by the expression on his face, it’s nothing short of maddening.

Sam looks back at the woman, Mockingbird. She’s still wearing that cutting grin, but there’s something else to the way her eyes keep shifting between them. _Full family reunion, _she’d said to Natasha, not to Steve, which makes Sam think her curiosity has nothing to do with Barnes at all.

Before he can think on that anything further, a door at the far end of the warehouse behind Mockingbird opens, and a figure cast in shadow steps into the light.

Sam doesn’t recognise him. He’s not particularly tall, seems in fact as far from threatening as a man can be, in his nice suit with his soft featured face, dark hair receding and hands loose by his sides.

A sound like a gut punch comes from Steve, and when Sam turns around, even Natasha has more colour in her cheeks than he’s seen in days.

“Coulson,” Steve says, and he sounds – he sounds _wrecked._

The man gives a small smile.

“Hello, Captain. Agent Romanov. You must be Ms Maximoff and First Lieutenant Wilson. Mr Lang.”

Coulson’s got an oddly pleasant voice, not exactly warm but strong, durable. More _not rough _than truly soft.

“Scott, your plane is waiting,” Natasha says without acknowledging Coulson’s words, frost on her lips. “You can trust them. They’ll get you home.”

Scott’s eyes widen, head spinning left to right to left with wonder at the sudden change.

“You – you’re sure?”

Natasha barely grazes Coulson with her eyes as she sweeps back to Mockingbird and around again.

“You can trust Phil Coulson to get the job done.”

It _should _be a compliment. The words are complimentary, she even outright used the word _trust, _which is hardly an oft-spoken syllable in Natasha’s vocabulary. She says it with confidence, and she says it without flinching, and it _should _be a compliment.

And yet, it doesn’t really sound like one.

It sounds, somehow, like an insult, and Coulson certainly reacts like it’s one, judging by the sharpness that appears in his eyes as he stares at her.

He looks at them all, takes them in one by one, counting, and is as obviously put out by the lack of a _full family reunion _as Mockingbird had been.

“Mr Lang,” Mockingbird says, gesturing to the door by which Coulson had entered.

Scott heaves a deep breath, scooping up the two rucksacks carrying what little he’s bringing with him. He looks at them all, smile wobbling with his own surprise and glee and terror.

Steve has finally wrenched his eyes from Coulson, and steps forwards to shake Scott’s hand.

“I hope everything works out for you, Scott,” Steve says, and Scott _beams _with it.

“Thanks, Cap – Steve, Captain Rogers. You – you too.”

He offers only a nod to Natasha, who gives Scott something that Sam is shocked to find he’s able to call a _smile. _It certainly looks genuine, looks like more well wishes than she could ever have voiced anyhow, and Sam’s still reeling from it when he grabs Scott’s hand to shake firmly, before being pulled into a hug.

“Thanks for not dropping me in the ocean, Sam,” Scott says with utter sincerity.

Sam hugs him back. He’s shaking with it, and Sam shakes a little, too, and thinks about Steve’s words last night.

_You could go, you know._

Sam had said no, and he’d meant it, he really had. Jesus, though, if a vicious slice of envy isn’t cracking him in two right now.

“Don’t be an idiot, Scott,” he tells him, to a scoff from Scott in return.

Wanda gets a hug, too, of course. Her face is briefly buried in Scott’s shoulder, and Sam turns away before he can be tempted to eavesdrop on whatever they murmur into each other’s ears as they embrace. Unfortunately, this puts Sam’s attention directly on Natasha, whose smile has vanished.

She’s looking at Coulson, who is looking back with a crease in his brow, as if trying to read her, as if he _could._

If Natasha ever looks at him the way she’s looking at Coulson now, Sam can readily admit he would be out of the door and across the nearest border in record time.

“Well, guys,” Scott says, wrenching everybody’s attention mercifully onto him, his red-rimmed eyes and his crooked grin. “Take care of yourselves, OK? It’s been – it’s been an honour.”

His salute is terrible, but the most genuine gesture Sam’s maybe ever seen, and a laugh drags painfully out of his chest as he returns it, and so does Steve. Sam’s ego is checked enough to know whose returning salute makes Scott blush like that.

He follows the line of Mockingbird’s directing finger, and she walks just behind his shoulder, all the way to the door, where she turns. Her grin, an angular shape of something similar to longing.

“Tell him there’s a space on May’s team, if he gets bored,” she says. “New SHIELD has some new perks.”

“I will,” Natasha replies, letting her mouth quirk upwards at one corner.

Sam wonders if Mockingbird can read the falsehood in it.

If she can, she doesn’t mention it. She simply walks out of the door, grating it shut behind her, leaving four fugitives and the new Director of SHIELD.

“How did –” Steve says, but he gets no further before Natasha turns on her heel and makes for the exit on the other side.

“Natasha,” Coulson says, a little too loud, the vowel sounds ringing in the air about them.

“There is nothing you can say that will change this,” Natasha replies, stopping in her tracks with her hand on her gun.

Coulson looks down at the floor, then at Steve, then the back of Natasha’s head. There’s no telling which is the hardest to look at.

“Will you tell Barton – will you tell Clint?”

Sam’s breath turns to shards in his lungs. Wanda’s arm is a hot, red line against his own.

Steve looks devastated, in a way he hasn’t since Tony left his hospital room. His hands clench into fists and his jaw tightens around God knows what. When Natasha turns back around, her smile could burn a city to ruins.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she asks, to Coulson’s bewilderment.

“It was too dangerous, Natasha,” Coulson says, all reason, unlike his eyes, which are wild with his confusion.

Has he guessed yet?

Sam can’t begin to imagine.

He takes hold of Wanda’s hand, feels the heat of her magic in her palm and Coulson’s gaze darts down to the movement, takes it in and slots it into place with the jigsaw of Steve’s car crash expression and Natasha’s blazing silence.

“Natasha,” Coulson whispers, ever so softly, so soft it barely leaves his lips.

“Congratulations on your promotion, Director Coulson,” is all Natasha says, and then she’s gone.

The rest of them stand a little longer, the aftermath of Hurricane Romanov and her wrath.

Wanda tugs Sam’s hand, eyes glazed and mouth set, and he nods. They leave, hand in hand, after Natasha’s ghost. Sam feels the rhythm of Wanda’s control, the ebb and flow of her magic as she lets it surface and bury and ripple in her skin, warming his own.

It’s only once they’re outside, in cool air that’s spitting raindrops that land and linger on their faces, that Wanda takes a gulping breath.

“You alright?” he asks as she tips her face to the sky with her eyes closed.

“I don’t listen to people minds, when I can help it,” she says, and honestly, the thought hadn’t even occurred to Sam that she would. He’s always thought that particular gift sounded more like a curse.

He waits a little longer, while the rain rolls over Wanda’s cheeks like tears. When she speaks, her voice crackles as potent as the power in her hands.

“But sometimes, a person’s mind is so _loud.”_

Sam nods, as if he knows, as if he could ever comprehend. He thinks perhaps he can, even without her curse-gift. That loudness of the mind, in the way they are growing and changing, the way they know each other too well, already.

He keeps hold of her hand, squeezes back when her fingers tighten.

Over Wanda’s shoulder, he can see Natasha in the distance, the red of her hair in the rain as she walks away.

*

Sam meets Hawkeye for the first time on a very, very difficult day.

It’s not a great first impression, but it’s far from a bad one, either. He’s competent and persistent and just enough of an asshole for Sam to believe he’s genuine.

It’s only at word from Fury that Sam doesn’t fight his way into the vehicle that they put a half-drowned Steve into, and it’s only at word from Fury that Sam doesn’t try to track them, either.

He goes home, as instructed, and he sleeps without dreaming, and wakes up only when his stomach demands feeding.

Three days later, somebody knocks on his kitchen window at twelve minutes past eleven at night.

Sam stares incredulously at Barton, who’s wearing all black, tufts of dark gold hair spilling out from underneath his hood. As soon as he unlocks the window, Barton pushes it up and hoists himself inside, somehow without knocking over the ten thousand things littering the worktop that he vaults over.

Barton waits until the window is closed and locked before pulling down his hood and looking around the kitchen with nosy intrigue.

“Got any coffee?”

Sam thinks, briefly, about pointing out it’s getting close to midnight. In the end, he just turns the coffee machine on.

“Thanks, man,” Barton says with a genuine uptick of gratitude, immediately sitting himself down at Sam’s kitchen table.

“Not that I don’t love an unexpected social call,” Sam says pointedly as he pulls two cups out of the dishwasher he still hasn’t gotten around to emptying.

“Oh, yeah, here.”

Barton pulls a phone out of his pocket and drops it on the table.

“It’s got a number for me on there, and one for Nat and one for Steve. Steve probably won’t be picking up yet because he’s practicing his narcoleptic tyrant routine, but if you need anything, uh. I’m in New York. Nat’s somewhere close by, probably. There are also numbers for Fury and Hill but, honestly, I have no idea if Fury would pick up and I promised Hill she’d not be disturbed for at least two weeks so _please _don’t call her unless, you know, everyone else is dead or something.”

Sam gives him a sceptical look, which Barton returns with a charming smile that he does not trust at all.

“Any news on the missing Sergeant?” Sam asks, and at Barton’s blank expression, he suddenly wonders if nobody’s told him who the Winter Soldier _is._

Barton blinks, eyeing the coffee pot with longing as it starts to drip, before replying.

“Not a peep. I’m dealing with this one super soldier at a time.”

Sam can’t disagree with that logic. He nods, waiting to pour two cups of coffee before sitting at the table, too.

Barton gulps down half his cup much faster than anyone should, and Sam makes a mental note to double check Hawkeye’s enhanced status. Sam’s own cup is entirely too hot to be doing anything more than warm his hands with.

“A narcoleptic tyrant?” he says, rather than ask any of the other questions itching at him.

Like if they’ve found Rumlow yet, or if there’s been any more retaliatory action from HYDRA, or why Maria Hill is on two weeks of radio silence, or where Fury’s disappeared to, or how the fuck Steve Rogers isn’t _dead._

Barton chuckles, that one syllable, one note, blunt laugh from the riverbank.

“Oh yeah. Sleep’s pretty much all he can do to heal faster at this point, and _boy _is he an even worse patient than I am. He threatened to break my bow if I didn’t release him from his _prison cell _this morning. I told him to do as he pleased, left him some fresh clothes on his bed and then went back to wake him up for lunch five hours later.”

Sam grins, taking a sip of his coffee, still hot enough to sting his lips, just as Barton drains his cup.

At the expression of sheer longing he gives the machine, Sam waves at him to help himself.

Barton gives him an actual smile, teeth and all, and pretty much lunges for the pot, pouring another cup and taking a gulp.

From the side as Barton scans out of the window into the still night, Sam can see a small insert in his ear, a comm unit, and he rears back.

“Who’re you on to?” he asks, perhaps a little sharper than he intends.

Barton twists his neck, bewildered owl blinking, then lifts a hand to his ear and laughs.

“You’ve not read the leaked files yet, then,” he says.

Sam frowns at that. Yes, he has read some of it, and why shouldn’t he? But it’s been three days and Sam’s bruised to hell, exhausted, he’s barely skimmed –

Barton pulls the comm out of his ear to reveal a violet and grey mould, then puts it back.

“It’s a hearing aid,” he says, which, _damn._

“How do you keep a secret like that living the superhero life?”

Perhaps Barton was expecting a different question altogether, because there’s something like confusion in his hesitation, even if it doesn’t show in his face beyond his tight-lipped smile. He sips his coffee and returns to his seat, nudging the phone he left on the table closer to Sam’s elbow.

“You ever seen Tasha or I in the Avengers press highlights?”

And, well, actually.

No, is the truth.

Beyond pixelated images from camera phones of a redheaded figure fighting, or an archer on a building rooftop, there’s very little to be found about the two SHIELD agent contributions to the Avengers. Sam hadn’t even known what they’d looked like before he’d met them.

Sam gives him a _that’s fair _shrug. It probably wouldn’t have gone down well for their spy careers if they’d shown up on the front cover of the New York Times or in the background of the next Presidential campaign.

He thinks about Barton’s words, the _leaked files. _Medical and all, apparently. Sam wonders how well known it had been in the criminal underworld before three days ago that the sniper known as Hawkeye was deaf.

Sam thinks he might be starting to see something more to the bitter anger that Barton had greeted his partner with when they ran into him at the river.

Rather than ask if there’s any truth to his insight, Sam decides to pull the conversation back to the more safely common topic at hand.

“Who’s taking care of the narcoleptic tyrant, then, while you’re here?”

“My dog,” Barton says, so flat and dry it might actually be the truth. “Natasha’s going on the stand for this. She’s giving a statement on behalf of all of you. Fury. SHIELD. If the council know your name, they might come for you, too.”

Sam grits his teeth. _Let _them, he’d happily give them a piece of his mind right about now.

Barton’s stare is impenetrable, carries none of Steve’s softness and none of Natasha’s sharpness. For a moment, there’s something so downright _unlikeable _about him, Sam feels himself withdraw from it.

“I’d advise you refuse,” Barton says, in the same flat and dry voice.

Honestly, Sam’s dizzy with the spinning top turns of Barton’s manner, one moment sweet and honest, the next minute all rebuttal and stone. He’s changeable as the sky, and Sam doesn’t trust it; wonders how Steve does, Steve Rogers, with his genuine golden boy morality.

“That so?” Sam asks lightly, sipping his coffee.

“You’ve got a good record, Wilson,” Barton says, which is all Sam needs to know exactly how nosy he is. “Don’t fuck it up letting them tie you up in politics. This isn’t fighting the good fight. Let Natasha deal with them.”

Sam doesn’t concede; he doesn’t refuse, either.

Barton drains his second cup of coffee, takes it to the sink and goddamn washes it like a perfect little houseguest, dries it with a cloth and puts it back where Sam took it from. He does it all with such unassuming ease, including turning his back entirely to Sam for almost ten full seconds, and the display of apparent trust is at complete odds with the rest of him.

He doesn’t seem to be _expecting _an answer, more to the point.

Unlocking the window and heaving it up, Barton points at the phone next to Sam’s arm.

“Anytime, OK?” he says, flat and dry and hard and rough and outright, blatantly sincere.

Sam nods, inexplicably reassured and suspicious in equal measure, as Barton heaves himself back out the way he came in.

*

In the jet, when the engine splits apart.

In the jet, Sam straps the Falcon wings over his torso and Steve bellows at him to go.

Scott in his pocket and Wanda in his arms.

Steve is ordering him to get them out. Barton’s yelling at him to keep hold of Wanda. And Sam, Sam’s too busy yelling at Barton, too busy to notice the way Steve’s hand pushes up against the joining of his wings.

Too busy to _notice._

He drops backwards into the storm and the hellfire and down towards the ocean, and he doesn’t notice the missing tracker in his suit, not for almost a week.

*

He doesn’t notice.

*

Natasha gets to Wakanda expecting five men and one woman and a bed to sleep in and not much else.

She gets two men, one woman and one Winter Soldier and the news that the mission isn’t over yet.

And still, Sam doesn’t notice.

*

It’s Natasha’s decision to go to Stark for help.

_Easy for her,_ Sam can’t help but think. She never saw him from the other side of a prison cell. Never heard Barton yelling bloody murder at him, terrible threats that Stark had shrugged off easy, and Sam burns to know what he said that provoked Barton, but Barton wouldn’t mention it.

Not to mention, there’s that doubt, isn’t it? That nagging doubt.

Barnes has told him what went down in Siberia. An extremely edited version, no doubt, but the gist of it is clear. Tony and Steve are not on the same page, are not even reading the same _book _right now. Who’s to say Tony doesn’t already know all too well what’s happened?

They’re on the landing pad, Natasha watching the plane as it’s checked over by Wakanda’s best engineers and Sam watching her while she expertly conceals how very much she must be freaking out right now.

“If he wasn’t involved in taking them, he’ll want to help,” she says with brusque confidence that Sam can’t help but believe. She invites trust, this extraordinary woman, however much she does not give it freely.

“And if he was involved?” Sam asks.

Natasha looks at him. Her eyes are the same shade of green as always yet they’ve flattened, somehow, grown impenetrable. It’s not the first time Sam has wondered how two people like Natasha Romanov and Clint Barton can look so different and seem so alike simultaneously.

Until this very moment, Sam hadn’t really bought into his own fears, hadn’t really considered the option.

She wouldn’t kill Tony. She wouldn’t. That’s not what’s going to happen, whatever he’s done.

Her flat eyes and her flat voice, how has Sam ended up in this list? The Winter Soldier and the Black Widow and Hawkeye. Killers in their bones.

“You shouldn’t harbour illusions, Sam,” Natasha tells him. “It’s a dangerous habit.”

*

She doesn’t kill Tony.

He wasn’t involved, and he _does _want to help, of course he does, but the deus ex machina doesn’t come from him, in the end, not exactly.

It’s been almost a week since Sam crash landed on the coast of Wakanda, a collared witch in his arms and an ant-sized man in his pocket.

Almost a week, before he goes to Princess Shuri’s lab to ask after his Falcon wings.

She presents them to him gladly, along with a multitude of suggestions for increased durability and flexibility, and Sam’s so caught up in it he almost _still _doesn’t notice. Except, except.

“Is this what it was like when you found us?” he asks, and the Princess follows the path of his hand over the spinal ridge, which has four implanted tracking devices between the wings.

Or, it _should _have four.

There are only three, now.

“Yes,” Shuri replies, a frowning question in her voice. “Is there something missing?”

Sam tries to picture it, the blur of the rolling jet, Barton fighting for control from the pilot’s seat and Steve helping strap him into the suit.

Did he? Would he?

Could he?

“Yes,” he says, gasping. _“Yes. _I – we need to contact Natasha and Stark right now.”

“What is it?” Shuri asks, even as she signals for two guards to fetch her brother. “What is missing?”

Sam presses an index finger into the barely noticeable indent, which would sit right between his shoulder blades when worn – it’s missing a small red metallic triangle.

“There,” he says. His unbroken hand is shaking. “It’s a tracking device, I use it for short range but the frequency, it might – if Stark – I think Steve grabbed it. I think Steve took it in case they got caught.”

At the top of the stairs, over Shuri’s shoulder as she stares at him. T’Challa, looking hopeful for the first time since they crashed into his coastline.

And behind him, Barnes’ eyes are wide and blue.

*

There’s this guilt, like the survivor’s kind. The _I’m sorry you’re dead but my life isn’t all that different because of it _kind.

There’s the _I died too but I got better _kind.

And then this. The other kind of guilt.

The _Why didn’t I notice sooner _kind of guilt.

*

That one, it stays. Stays a long, long time.

*

_Christ Wilson, where’s the fire?_ Riley shouts after him, startled and laughing, and Sam doesn’t manage to reply before they’re in the air, soaring like the world belongs to them, and the sky to their wings.

Sam sees it, nothing like the slow motion he was always promised.

Sees it happen, real time, like he was just up there to watch.

*

_I can do that, _he says, and he means it.

They share a two text conversation once a month and It’s enough, usually.

Rhodey calls, sometimes. Not very often.

And Sam, he calls just the once.

*

_“Sam,” _he says in a warm voice when he picks up on the seventh ring, so he must be alone.

For a moment, it seizes him. A tidal wave, a hurricane, some natural disaster of his situation.

He is exhausted.

He’s exiled, a fugitive, and he doesn’t _want _it, he hates it, hates it with everything, can’t bear it, wants to be there right this second, laying daffodils on his grave because he didn’t last year.

“R-Rhodey,” Sam whispers, even though he’s by himself in the apartment, has been alone for four days, or maybe all his life.

_“Sam, what’s wrong? Has something happened?”_

“I need – fuck – Rhodey, I need you to – can you do me a favour?”

There’s the briefest of pauses, where there is only Sam’s heart smacking its way out of his ribcage as he burrows into the corner of the kitchen, cold coffee spilled all over the floor.

_“Anything, Sam,” _Rhodey says, and maybe it’s on purpose, the mirror of Sam’s own promise a year ago.

Sam takes a deep, stuttering breath. Swallows his oxygen before it can choke him.

“There’s a grave. First Lieutenant R-Riley Holte. He died today. I mean. Not. The anniversary’s today. I didn’t. I always. I never.”

It crests over him, years and years and none at all.

His face stings with tears and his chest aches with sobs and God knows how long it takes for them to stop, too long, too fucking long, _Do better, Wilson, _but Rhodey, he just waits. He waits patient as the saints and he talks in a very quiet voice that sounds like a parent and a CO and a friend and Sam, he just keeps fucking _crying._

Rhodey waits and he talks, and eventually, Christ, _eventually, _Sam quietens to nothing but the whisper of his breath.

The coffee has pooled around his knee, soaking his jeans.

_“You still with me?” _Rhodey asks.

“Yeah.”

Sam’s voice cracks, and his head throbs where it must have banged against the wall.

_“Of course I’ll go, Sam,” _Rhodey says, like it’s no bother, like it’s nothing, like he doesn’t realise it’s everything. _“Just tell me where it is, and what you want me to bring.”_

Sam shivers, shoulders hunched together.

Abruptly, there’s the sound of a key in a lock, and he flinches, gun in hand before he can even scramble to his knees but the clock, it’s ticking, hours later than he realised.

Sam can hear his breath, and Rhodey’s voice still talking him to tranquil, and the figure in the doorway steps inside silently, shuts the door behind himself.

Steve stands very still, taking in what’s got to be a fucking dreadful sight. He doesn’t even look _angry _at Sam for being on the phone, doesn’t even ask who it is. He puts his bag down, and he walks forwards, until he can sit on the floor in front of Sam, cross-legged.

Gets coffee in his jeans, too, like he doesn’t mind.

He’s close enough that his feet brush against Sam’s.

Sam can’t tear himself from Steve’s eyes, even though the wet of his own is hot and painful and so goddamn selfish.

“Daffodils,” he says, after another moment’s silence, interrupting Rhodey’s trailing words.

_“Daffodils?” _Rhodey repeats for confirmation.

Sam swallows, mouth quivering. He clenches his fist on his knee in a bid for it to stop trembling.

“Yeah,” Sam says, quietly, burnt with the onslaught his grief and too defenceless not to feel it. “Daffodils.”

Slowly, cautiously, seeking permission with blinks of blue, Steve reaches out a hand and takes hold of one of Sam’s ankles. His fingers are warm, solid; this man, golden. Trustworthy. He squeezes tight in understanding, and his eyes never leave Sam’s face, not even when Sam looks down in shame.

_“I can do that,” _Rhodey says, easy, nothing, everything. _“Where is he?”_

Sam grabs Steve’s wrist and squeezes hard.

“He’s in D.C.,” he says and takes a deep breath.

Steve smiles at him, sad and gentle. An offering, an understanding.

They sit together, on the floor in a puddle of cold coffee.

By the time Sam puts the phone down, Rhodey’s promises burning in his chest and the creepie crawlie sensation of embarrassment prickling up his spine, Steve is looking at him with all the deeply rooted compassion that Sam’s been trying and failing to hand out this whole time, so cripplingly vast in its reach.

“Sam,” Steve says.

Sam nods furiously as reactionary apologies stutter out of him, it's reckless, it's selfish, he shouldn't, he can't, but Steve brushes them away with a confused frown.

_“Sam,” _he says again.

Sam bites the insides of his cheeks.

“You don’t have to carry this by yourself.”

Sam closes his eyes, and tries to nod his head more slowly, tries his best not to feel like a complete and total fraud.

When he opens them, and he looks at Steve, looks him square in the face. Steve Rogers, goddamn Captain America, soaked in cold coffee and smiling like he knows, and of course he _does, _it’s a painful, wonderful thing.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, for all the little things, and all the big things, too.

“I’m sorry, too,” Steve replies, and they share it, the weight of it.

Carry it between them, the losses, and the gains.

*

_Christ, Wilson, where's the fire? _he asked, and he was laughing.

Bit of a stupid kid, bit of a sweetheart.

*

Sam tells him everything, and Steve listens.

Of course he listens.

*

*


End file.
